The Psychology of Singing / A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern

by David C. Taylor

A keen enjoyment is experienced in the skilful performance of many complex muscular activities. Much of the pleasure of skating, dancing, rowing, tennis, etc., is dependent on this feeling of muscular poise and harmonious contraction. Healthy exercise is always normally enjoyable; but skilful performance greatly enhances the pleasure. A beginner learning to skate, for example, exerts himself fully as much as the accomplished skater. Yet the beginner does not by any means derive the same degree of pleasure from his exertions.

Precisely this feeling of balanced and harmonious muscular exertion is experienced by the perfect singer. More than this, the hearer also, through sympathetic sensations, shares the same pleasurable feeling. This is the sensation described as the feeling of soaring, of poise, and of floating, in many descriptions of the "singer's sensations."

Singing on the Breath

When the voice is perfectly used the tones seem to detach themselves from the singer, and to float off on the breath. Nothing in the sound of the tones, nor in the sympathetic sensations awakened, gives any indication that the breath is checked or impeded in its flow. The current of tone seems to be poured out on the breath just as freely as a quiet expiration in ordinary breathing.

This is a purely empirical description of perfect singing. As we know very well, the vocal action is quite different from this description. But the important point is that the phrase "singing on the breath" does very accurately describe the impression made on the hearer by perfect singing.

Singing on the breath represents the highest possible degree of purely vocal perfection. One may attend operas and concerts for a whole season and listen to a score of famous singers, and count oneself fortunate to have heard even one artist who attains this standard of tonal excellence. Singing on the breath is an effect of wondrous tonal beauty; it is simply this, pure beauty, pristine and naïve.

With the slightest degree of throat stiffness or muscular tension, singing on the breath is utterly impossible. So soon as the tones indicate the merest trace of throat contraction, the free outflow of the stream of sound is felt to be checked.

Coloratura singing, to be absolutely perfect, demands this degree of tonal excellence. Singing on the breath and coloratura are indeed very closely allied. The modern school of musical criticism does not hold coloratura singing in very high esteem. We demand nowadays expression, passion, and emotion; we want vocal music to portray definite sentiments, to express concrete feelings. Florid singing is not adapted to this form of expressiveness. It is only sensuously beautiful; it speaks to the ear, but does not appeal to the intellect.

Yet it may well be asked whether the highest type of coloratura singing, pure tonal beauty, does not appeal to a deeper, more elemental set of emotions than are reached by dramatically expressive singing. This question would call for a profound psychological discussion, hardly in place in a work devoted to the technical problem of tone-production. But this much is certain: Coloratura singing still has a strong hold on the affections of the music loving public. Even to-day audiences are moved by the vocal feats of some famous queen of song fully as profoundly as by the performance of a modern dramatic or realistic opera.

To describe a sound is an extremely difficult task. The tone of the muted horn, for example, is perfectly familiar to the average musician. Yet who would undertake to describe in words the tone of the muted horn? A description of the sounds produced by a perfectly managed voice is almost as difficult to frame in words. Still the old Italian masters succeeded in finding words to describe perfect singing. These few simple phrases—open the throat, support the tone, sing the tones forward, sing on the breath—embody a most beautiful and complete description of vocal perfection. The empirical study of the voice can hardly be expected to go further than this. From the old masters we have received a complete record of all that need be known empirically about the voice.